topic Re: Off-Sheet Connections in EAGLE Forum

Off-Sheet Connections

sphillipsT3N7F — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 18:24:01 GMT

Hello,

I'm sure this question has been asked before but I am unable to find anything about it on this forum, just past posts many years ago (early CadSoft days).

Most of my schematics are always multi-sheet documents with many off-sheet net connections. Some of the time this isn't a large issue to just label and name the nets, but with some more complex designs it can be unclear how many off-sheet connections there are, and where they are. This can be a significant hindrance in schematic review and has caused issues for me previously.

Anyways.. to the question: Is there a way to automatically indicate and track off-sheet connections (sheet and maybe even location reference) on nets?

Thanks!

Re: Off-Sheet Connections

edpataky — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 17:30:29 GMT

Just for clarity, currently there is no explicit off-sheet connector, and nets are global within module (or completely global if there are no moduels) so any named net that exists on multiple sheets acts as if there are "off-sheet connectors" attached connecting them

However, this question of how this is handled globally and within and between modules/hierarchical design, and how the user can track them, is being reviewed currently within the development team, so there will be changes in future EAGLE versions around these operations to make them more intuitive .. thanks for the input we will certainly make note of it

Re: Off-Sheet Connections

sphillipsT3N7F — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 17:56:42 GMT

Thanks for the reply, this is what I had suspected. I look forward to a more elegant solution to track global nets within multi-sheet documents.

Re: Off-Sheet Connections

C.Nicks — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 19:51:30 GMT

There are a few useful tools out there that can help out in regard to multi-sheet schematic reviews. One of my favorite tool sets is called MLutils.ulp written by Morten Leikvoll. It's pretty hard to find out in the wild, but I have a copy in my repository. The original post at eagle central has the account suspended, but here is the cached version.

I have written this ULP toolbox that does something similar and other
very useful functions for multi schematic and large designs. (To
install, see bottom)

This may do what you are after:Right click a part in sch/brd, and select
locate in brd/sch from the context menu. It will switch focus between
brd/sch for a selected part.

Another useful function is the "navigate" that lists all connections for
a specific net, and allows you to goto any of them. (I'm not happy with
the list format atm, it looks a bit messy, so I may change it in a
future version). It also does some ERC, but don't trust it blindly.

Another cool feature I have added is the "group segment past/upto via"
feature, that can group a full same-layer net segment by right clicking
a wire of it, so you can easily change layer for it all. You have the
choice to group upto or past vias.
NOTE:This can also be done on buses, but unfortunately the context menu
can not execute on groups, so you have to execute it manually.
If you group at least one wire of each signal in a bus and type "run
MLutils groupsignal", it will group all (same layer) of it, so you can
easily change layer of the full bus.

There are some other useful functions too, like polygon:move, ripup and
viacount, layers:hide, display affected.

I hope cadsoft reads this, maybe they can include some of these
functions in a future version, and keep developing this context menu
feature so this can look and function even more nice. Right now (7.7.0),
even polygon functions pop up when selecting a wire, and there are
missing objects that I would like to get my hands on through context menus.

To install this ulp, type "run MLutils install" in the command line. To
remove, "run MLutils remove".

I have found the net navigate feature to be invaluable when working with large multi-sheet designs. See it in action below.

Re: Off-Sheet Connections

edpataky — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 21:29:49 GMT

Thank you for the post, we will surely review all of this!